Having threaded thru life in a bumbling manner, perhaps this attempt at documenting faults and failures will help me have a fresher outlook of life.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Techies, Sales and Business

Managing Technical people can be tiring. It is currently only challenged by managing Sales Guys. Making these two groups of people communicate with each other can be very laborious.

You have these group of Techies which are characterized by engineer lost in their world of TCP/IP, SIP and MPLS expounding the features of the bits and bytes of the TCP/IP world and how the packets will negotiate etc.

Then you match these with people who are "Hunter/Gatherer" in nature - otherwise known as Sales people, coming back and describing what the customers wants. Not being able to comprehend technological stuff, some of these people's best desciption is generally based on similies. You will get statement like "Can we have a broadband service like Streamyx?". You end up guessing whether are we to provide broadband that has features such as major downtime, unpredictable performance or does he just mean that customers just want always on connection?

I have seen Business managers and Product Development guys/gals have their hair pullout trying to decipher customers needs to match technologies and engineering services capabilities. I wonder how other MNC manages Product and Capability Development Lifecycle?